Each chapter in this curious, personal book starts with an anagram beginning “after the trees. . ..” In each chapter the sentence is finished in a different fashion—there is no single answer to what comes after the trees.
Douglas Ian Stewart was a man with a mission. He was determined to get to the Amazon and carry out research for his undergraduate thesis, no matter what it took.
It is clear that it took a lot; but with the guiding influence of Emilio Moran and Nigel Smith, both established scholars of recent Amazonian development, Stewart set off to see what had happened 20 years after these scholars had documented the lives of recent colonists in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. The questions he set out to answer were, How would colonists adapt to their new environment in the long run? How would they alter the ecosystem? and How would the Amazon be developed? (p. 6).
Stewart undertook a general survey on one stretch of the Altamira Highway, concentrating on the relationship between soil type and agricultural practices in one community on Side Road 27. The results of this work are presented as a backdrop for an admittedly biased examination of the policies that caused the development of the eastern Brazilian Amazon, the effects these policies have had on small farmers, and the state of these farmers 20 years after this frontier was expanded. The book also addresses the long-term fate of these people and their ways of gaining a livelihood; all set against the backdrop of the forest.
Stewart was enchanted by what he found. Like an eighteenth-century traveler on his first trip outside his home country, Stewart was fascinated by the novel plants and animals and beguiled by the lives of the rural people he met. He became an unabashed advocate of a group that has few advocates, the recent and somewhat less recent colonists of the Brazilian Amazon. “If my biases toward the colonists are not already evident, I admit them” (p. 9). These biases lead to the message he clearly wants to deliver most forcibly—that for the long-term benefit of the colonists, the Brazilian nation, and the forest itself, a second land distribution must be made, directed by the colonists themselves, which would firmly root the smallholder to the land.
Delighted though Stewart was to have been there and to have had the chance to write this book, the reader cannot always share that delight. This is an odd book; it reads like a combination of “letters home” and polemic. Even though this reviewer is not a student of Brazilian Amazon development, he found many points that might be contested. Stewart’s grasp of the politics of indigenous peoples and their interactions with colonists is simplistic, as is his understanding of the ecology of the region in which he traveled. If Stewart were able to arrange the world the way he wished for the colonists, in this reviewer’s opinion, after the trees there would be only the colonists’ agricultural fields and pastures.
